Announcing BrickBuiltNameplates.com

I have long wanted to start my own business, and have worked toward that goal for a few years now.
On July 29, 2011 I launched that work publicly in the form of ​BrickBuiltNameplates.com.
It took a lot of work to get to this point, but I know a mountain of work remains before me.

Many, many late nights and busy weekends, interrupted all-too-frequently by RealLife(TM)
, trickled into one business idea in particular: a nameplate for your desk, built out of Lego pieces.
But not just any old pre-built mosaic nameplate like some people offer--that's just not good enough.
It had to be as detailed as possible, and that meant using advanced building techniques referred to as "Studs Not On Top", or ​SNOT.
And building with Lego is the fun part, so it's got to come with clear, step-by-step instructions, not pre-assembled.
And when those instructions run to a hundred pages or more, paper ceases to be viable, and you have to go digital--namely to a pdf on a CD.
The final result is a nameplate on a desk that gets incredulous responses of "That's LEGO?!" and "Cool!".

There are a surprising number of things required to bring such a vision to life.

I implemented the core logic and design using ​Python.
This was the first part I worked on--afterall, if I couldn't make the core idea work, the rest of the trappings of business would be pointless.
The core of this early work remains, though I have revisited much of the original prototype to improve the durability of the nameplates and add support for more characters.
(And I have ideas for more enhancements I'd like to do.)
At first, I had support for the upper-case alphabet and spaces.
Since then, I've added support for digits and 13 punctuation marks--50 different characters in all.
With that, you aren't limited to "first-name-space-last-name"--you can include honorifics, or quoted nick-name middle names, or make email addresses, or even (short) sentences.

There were a few wheels that I didn't have to reinvent, though most of them required a bit of work.
I had to work on LPub, ​LDView, ​ldglite, and ​Satchmo, to package, customize, fix bugs and add features.
Thankfully, the authors of these tools released them under OpenSource licenses, so molding them to my needs was actually possible.
Using ​Django yielded a functional website after a not-too-difficult learning curve.

And that was just the technical side.
There was also filing paperwork with the county to register the business name, setting up an account with Google Checkout, getting set up to collect sales tax for the state, buying inventory, and numerous other little things lost to the mists of a sleep-deprived memory.

The next learning curve to climb is something called "marketing".
I hear it's important...